Posted 9:39 AM by Susan Darst Williams

AHA! FORMER CHICAGO SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT VALLAS
CONFIRMS THAT THE OBAMA-AYERS ED PROJECT BOMBED

Paul Vallas, now the superintendent of "recovery" schools in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, was the chief ed guy in Chicago when Bill Ayers wrote the grant to establish the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.

Barack Obama ended up as board chairman, presiding over the distribution of the eventual $150 million or so that was supposed to help inner-city Chicago kids learn better.

In a Monday story in the New York Post, though, Vallas confirmed that the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was a complete failure that did nothing for kids. Read the story here:

www.nypost.com/seven/10202008/news/politics/f_for_baracks_school_fix_134391.htm

Read the final report of the Challenge, too, which I posted last Friday. It concludes on p. 1 of the executive summary that the project had "little impact on student outcomes." THAT'S the best face they could put on it?!?

http://ccsr.uchicago.edu/downloads/p62.pdf

For an eye-opening look at how radical Ayers' education philosophies really are, spend some time on the following blog as well. Author: Steve Diamond. Don't know him, but his research looks good.

It details how the millions in the Challenge in Chicago were sidetracked away from schools, and into community activist groups such as ACORN and others. The goal was to build political capital and favors for Obama, instead of doing what was necessary to improve the students' reading, writing and arithmetic skills:

http://globallabor.blogspot.com

Apparently, Obama funded Ayers' Small Schools Workshop project, whose main goal was to strip elected school boards of any semblance of power in Chicago, and instead set up "site-based management councils."

These are eerily like the "soviets" that ran the former Soviet Union -- little collectives where groupthink and "consensus" overruled professional practice and intelligent decisionmaking.

In Chicago, the distressed inner-city schools were run by "councils" that had a majority of inner-city parents. They thus could outmuscle principals and teachers on every issue. Indeed, reportedly almost all white principals wound up fired in inner-city Chicago, because of these "mini-soviets" that the Ayers plan set up. Elected school boards, and longtime professional educators, were pushed out of the loop. And the schools got even WORSE.

That's what Ayers means by "community empowerment." Not a dollar of it went for instruction and educational improvement. The power shifted to the rabble, whose favor was bought with someone else's money.

It was educational communism in action. And Chicago's inner-city schools are doing even worse today than they did before.

Ohhhh! THAT'S where we get the expression "The Little RED Schoolhouse"!!!

Again, we salute University of Nebraska Regent Randy Ferlic for blowing the whistle on the invitation from N.U.'s College of Education and Human Sciences to Ayers to come and speak at the 100th anniversary celebration next month. Hope everybody else wakes up about the Obama connections to Ayers and others like him, before Election Day.

Labels: Ayers, Ayers Barack Obama N.U. College of Education queer studies, Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Vallas